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How Does FaceTime Work?

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Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#101

Post by pfranz »

solarkraft wrote: post #91
pfranz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The presentation said something like they planned for it to be "open" or something. I believe that was the first the dev team had heard of it. People have guess that patents prevented it from actually being an open standard. Coincidentally, some of those patents expired in the last year or two and the last should expire this year. But I kind of guess the window has passed for it becoming open.

> But I kind of guess the window has passed for it becoming open. It’s moving there. They’re adding a web interface this year.

I found the clip from the 2010 keynote [1]. Steve Jobs said, "We’re going to take it all the way. We’re going to the standards bodies tomorrow and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." I didn't watch the whole video, so I might have missed some context, but this lines up with my memory.

I don't see a web client being a move in that direction.

[1] https://youtu.be/eujypqKT8o0?t=5809

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#102

Post by bleachedsleet »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #97
scatterhead wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it sounds like Facetime's Firefox support is better in your experience?

Facetime doesn't work in any browser, does it? On macOS and iOS it uses a dedicated app, the protocol is proprietary so no 3rd part clients exist?

FaceTime is coming to the web

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22522889/apple-facetime-an...

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#103

Post by krrrh »

caddybox wrote: post #61
sgt wrote: post #3

FaceTime is amazing. I keep in touch with my entire family using FaceTime video, often across thousands of kilometers. It's also such an equalizer, allowing even the non-computer literate to use it and focus on the actual conversations. In fact, my 103 year old grandmother is able to do video calls with me, which is great because I rarely see her in person these days. I don't think there exists an alternative she wou…

I think it is unfair to label a platform with a two hundred dollar entry barrier as an equalizer. VoIP and allied technologies are the real enablers and ad-supported platforms like WhatsApp et al. have been true equalizers by allowing anyone to communicate with anyone at marginal costs. The ease of picking up the phone and calling somebody with no consideration of cost has enabled so many people to connect and commun…

The cost of entry should be expressed as the difference between lower cost or used iPhones and iPads vs similar android devices. Even though there is a cost premium for iOS devices the proven longer longevity of arguably makes them cheaper for most people, especially light users who are happy sticking with a device for 5-8 years. The family members who do tech support for them can mostly rest happy with automatic security updates turned on.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#104

Post by cassianoleal »

jonathanbull wrote: post #79
cassianoleal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp is usable but nowhere near the video and audio quality of FaceTime. It's also only on mobile where the screen is rather small and audio quality is never great - not very important since they seem to use very high audio compression anyway.

Can't speak for the quality, but video calling has been available on desktop (Windows/MacOS) for a little while now – https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/04/whatsapp-rolls-out-voice-a...

I could never make video or audio calls work on my Mac. They were technically available, just didn't work.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#105

Post by andrecarini »

thisisussbs wrote: post #78
masterof0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you also need to buy a phone/computer/tablet to use whatsapp or signal? How does whatsapp is cheaper than facetime? But anyway, yeah, I noticed Facetime's both video and audio calls have better quality, in my personal experience. Also, most if not all my friends and family use iDevices, so I dont need to convince them to install signal/whatsapp/telegram etc... But YMMV.

Yes but a practical new Android phone with reasonable spec (I don't mean cheap Chinese oems with 1gb ram) can be had for $100 and can run WhatsApp/signal fine. The cheapest iphone is $399 iirc, the high entry costs that disqualifies a lot of people even in the US and certainly abroad where apple tax difference compare to base currency of usd399 exceeds regional sales tax differences (mexico for example)

In Brazil a new iPhone 6 costs about two months of the national average raw income, while a cheap Android alternative would be about 1/3rd to 1/4th of an average monthly salary.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#106

Post by kkielhofner »

myself248 wrote: post #99
kkielhofner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting human psychology note: I was involved in some early deployments of HD-ish codecs. HD codecs are considered to be anything that provides greater than the (less than) 4kHz frequency response of the traditional PSTN. At the time "HD audio" was generally 8kHz frequency response (16 kHz sampling rate because of Nyquist-Shannon[0]). This was around 2009 and many users, having not experienced that kind of freque…

That's funny, because I remember missing breath sounds when switching to digital cellular. That plus the added latency still makes it difficult to converse sometimes. It's weird to me how, after a century of obsessive attention to quality and latency all throughout the whole analog era, through the digital isochronous transition, and up into the first-gen analog cellular system, digital cellular was so much cheaper t…

It very well could have been that breath sounds just sounded differently, or the whole experience was unnerving to our user base (healthcare) at the time. In any case we set the sampling rate back to 8kHz and moved on.

I too miss the days of a B channel on a T1 PRI!

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#107

Post by the_third_wave »

comandillos wrote: post #4

Telegram also provides this service quality, its available on all platforms and its free.

There is also Nextcloud Talk [1] (based on Spreed [2]) for those who have their own Nextcloud server. I use both Telegram as well as NC Talk, quality is comparable. Telegram is a more capable messenger though, that part of NC Talk is underdeveloped.

[1] https://nextcloud.com/talk/

[2] https://www.spreed.eu/

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#108

Post by olyjohn »

mdasen wrote: post #90
lqet wrote: post #16

> For those of you old enough to remember landlines, it reminds me of those [...] When we all switched to cell service audio quality took a huge hit I don't understand - are landline phones not in use anymore? I only use a landline phone to communicate with the family, because I simply cannot stand the audio quality of cellphones for calls which last longer than a few minutes. Edit: In Germany, there are about 40 M a…

Landlines are expensive in a lot of places. Looking it up, a landline would cost me $70/mo which is significantly more than my mobile plan. I think different countries have different norms around things like landlines - or even texting. In the US, people ignored texting for a very long time and preferred to call people even if it was just a short note. In terms of audio quality, VoLTE has improved that quite a bit wh…

My landline here near Seattle is around $60/mo. I don't know why... back when I first set up a land line here, it was $25/mo. The quality of the line has deteriorated so bad, there's noise on it, they won't bother to fix it. A few years ago the line had a physical break somewhere between my house and the DSLAM. They switched me to another pair of copper. I have 3 pairs of copper coming into my house, but now one is totally dead, and I will never be able to use it again. Apparently our street is at full capacity and they have no plans to repair or add more lines.

The other problem with land lines is the amount of robocalls you get on them. The phone companies offer no way to truly block them. Every blocking service they offer relies on Caller ID, and with the robocallers spoofing Caller ID and randomizing numbers, the blocking is totally ineffective. I literally get 5-8 calls a day. They used to offer a call blocking service, where a machine would answer, and tell you to hang up, or press 1 if you wanted to connect. This service no longer exists, and the other call (ineffective) blocking services (they offer at least 3 or 4) each cost about $6/mo each. My belief is that they are making tons of money allowing unauthenticated calls into their network, that they have no desire to actually block any calls.

Also the relatively small number of landlines left leaves a rather small audience of people to complain. So most people don't even know this is a problem.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#109

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

miki123211 wrote: post #100

> For those of you old enough to remember landlines, it reminds me of those [...] When we all switched to cell service audio quality took a huge hit As a blind person with a lot of friends in different corners of the world, audio quality is very important to me. Surprisingly enough, I've seen side projects that took a weekend to develop that had much better quality than what mainstream services offer. Part of it is p…

I actually don't think bandwidth costs are responsible, nor DSP effects.

I suspect the lousy audio quality in modern voice conferencing software is to compensate for people with lousy internet connections or underpowered devices: someone using an older phone in the car on 3G cell service with cell tower handoffs, or a crusty laptop using lousy coffee shop WiFi, etc.

It's a tough problem to solve. Everyone on a call can be affected by one person with a lousy connection if the software isn't very sophisticated.

People are generally willing to tolerate lower bitrate audio if it means less dropouts, and lowering the bitrate for everyone is easy to do (if a bit lazy), and solves many problems.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#110

Post by piskov »

muststopmyths wrote: post #86

I remember back in the day when FaceTime was announced Apple made a big deal about it using standard protocols throughout the stack ( SIP and maybe WebRTC?) and dangled the hope that there could be 3rd party apps that connected with FaceTime. We were so young and naive then.

There were some (lost?) patent disputes afterwards which could have an impact on openess.
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